Enterprises having a substantial portion of their business conducted using front office operations for sales, support, account management, etc., may become more client centric by leveraging sophisticated customer insights to improve risk management, contact channel performance and customer satisfaction. Insightful operations also may allow for continuously tailoring services offered to changing customer needs. To succeed in the market place, front office operations of businesses need to strengthen customer relationships and improve customer experience in the different contact channels in a multi-channel environment. Most often, this requires increasing the quality and quantity of productive interactions with the customers. Fundamental to this is the ability to have insights about the customers such that customers can be reached at their preferred, convenient time and contact channel. This is especially the case when businesses and organizations need to reach out and initiate a contact with their customers and clients (outbound contact attempts) or simply return customer contacts as part of their customer relationship management.
Modern contact centers can handle a multitude of contact channels, such as phone, text messaging, e-mail, instant messaging (web chat including on social networks), telefax, and postal mail. Some of these contact channel types can have more than one instance or subtypes; for example, there may be several instances of phone channels, such as home, work, cell phone, etc. and there may be different instances of e-mail addresses, such as private and work email addresses.
Traditionally, the timing of customer contact attempts is based on staffing capacity, customer segments, and risk priorities, and may be guided by “typical” or “expected” behavior. In the call center industry, customers are increasingly asked about their preferred time to be contacted. While this information is collected, there is not always a systematic way of analyzing or using the collected information. In addition, the call/response patterns at the individual level are rarely utilized to guide outbound notifications. System operations such as interactive voice response units (IVRs) or the like may not be set up to ensure that contacts are always made during the most convenient/preferred time for all customers increasing the likelihood that dials are converted to successful customer interactions and hence, favorable business outcomes. Contacting customers at inconvenient times or at plain unavailable times lead to wasted contact attempts, poor customer experience, dissatisfied customers and a loss of business revenue as the opportunity to convert a call/contact into business value such as a sale or obtaining a payment is lost. Often, when outbound contact campaigns are made, the phone calls are picked up by parties who are not authorized to discuss the matter, which leads to enormous waste of resources and delayed resolution. The ability to increase right party contact and the ability to have an interaction enhances all front office operations.
According to an aspect of the prior art, right party contact (RPC) rates may be improved using observed and modeled patterns of customer behavior. These observed and modeled patterns of customer behavior may be implemented using a Best Time To Contact model (BTTC), which makes contact attempts using an exploitative model; i.e., it uses contact and behavior information already in its possession to determine the best contact channel/time period to use in attempting to contact a customer or client. According to one aspect of the BTTC model's exploitative approach, a set of customer-specific historical contact data may be used to estimate a statistical model which computes a score for determining a successful contact with each customer using a means for contact at a particular time period. This model, developed using historical customer data, may be modified based on additional customer data that may become available as the model is used to attempt contacting the customer. The output of the BTTC model may be used to schedule a number of contacts over a period of time.